Search Tips

The University search engine crawls public content under northwestern.edu domains, indexing keywords and phrases.

For best results, enter a query that is specific. For example, instead of a general term such as "annual report," narrow your search by including the name of the department that generated the report.

Global Marketing and Communications manages the Google Programmable Search collection. If you are a university webmaster/developer please refer to the information for webmasters. Not finding answers to your questions? Please send questions to webmaster@northwestern.edu.

Refine Your Search

You can use many of Google's defined search patterns to refine your results. Please note:

• Google Search usually ignores punctuation (except in the cases below).
• Don’t put spaces between the symbol or word and your search term. A search for site:thegarage.northwestern.edu will work, but site: thegarage.northwestern.edu won’t.

Exclude words from your search

Put - (a hyphen) in front of a word you want to leave out. For example, shakespeare garden -event

Search for an exact match

Put a word or phrase inside quotes. For example, "global marketing and communications".

Combine searches

Put "OR" between each search query. For example, president OR provost.

Search for a specific site

Put "site:" in front of a site or domain. For example, site:thegarage.northwestern.edu or site:.edu.

Source: Google Search Help